After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World

Before Althea could decide what to do next, several guards ran to their leaders.

The sight was actually quite fascinating. Orcs were practically half animals, and many of them, when dashing, ran on all fours, and they needed to move at their fastest.

For several types, such as the cheetahs and tigers, they could even be faster than humans more than ten levels above them.

”The women! Ill!” they yelled. ”VERY SICK!”

Althea’s eyebrows rose. It seemed that the women had already been discovered. It was sooner than she would’ve liked, but what was Althea if she couldn’t adjust her plans accordingly?

She saw the crowd and took this chance to get the word out to as many people as possible. She also had to put in a lot of disclaimers.

It wouldn’t do if they decided to kill the women because they looked unwell, right?

It was one of the reasons she was going around. She wanted to spread out how to handle the illness properly. Alas, one could plan all she wanted, but the world might not wait for her to execute it.

From below her feet, a pool of water started to form. They continued to control the flow in certain directions as if following a certain slope.

She chose the location of the puddles well, ensuring it could help her words reach more people without betraying her own location.

One could use water to create a sound amplifier or even reflect it in a way that it would seem like it could come from someplace else. This effect was called the acoustic reflection.

In normal cases, doing this perfectly wasn’t that straightforward. But who told her to be a water user with fast calculation capabilities?

Hiding at a corner, she leaned down at an angle while controlling the pond’s curvature, and yelled. ”The women are ill! Throw them out! Throw them out!”

Slightly changing her voice, she changed the curvature by a few millimeters, and spoke again. ”I saw it, I saw it! I heard about that before. If killed, the disease will spread all over! I heard when they killed one, the entire village got infected!

”AHHH! It is better to throw them out and let monsters eat them!”

The crowd heard it and their blood turned cold.

”What?”

”That is terrifying!”

”Get rid of them!”

The crowd was tense, and it was difficult to figure out where the voices came from. At the same time, the content was also very heavy, and at some point, they no longer cared who was speaking.

”It affects humans, not sure about orcs, but I won’t risk it!”

Then she heard something interesting from a pair of guards, whispering among themselves.

”Could it be nature’s anger?”

”Since we—”

”Hush!”

Althea looked at the priest, wondering what he’d do. She was nervous he’d see through the ruse. However, with the masses calling for the women to be thrown out, would he risk trying to keep them for investigation?

Her fear was that he’d try to prove whether it was even contagious by killing women directly, just placing some safety measures to calm the crowd.

Thinking of this, she had no choice but to release one of her secret powders, a paralyzing one. It wasn’t the level that could take down people above level 20, but since she was in a village, it was bound to have some effect. The key here was that it was colorless and odorless.

Using the soil beneath her feet, she secretly took the pellet underground, traveling until they reached under the guards’ feet. The village didn’t have much pavement, and even if it did it was not that deep. It didn’t take Althea much effort to move such a small thing underground.

Without anyone noticing, the pellet appeared underneath the guards’ feet. She used the pressure of emergence to crush it open, activating it.

Flop!

One by one, the guards, especially the weaker ones, fell down on the ground, making the crowd gasp in fear.

”They’re unconscious!!”

”AHH!”

”RUN!”

People immediately panicked and tried to run away, causing a stampede. They were lucky that they were mostly sturdy half-orcs and orcs in the plaza, otherwise, that chaos would’ve caused serious injuries or even deaths.

It was understandable that everyone panicked so much after such a ’mild’ display.

The Fire Plague had passed not long ago. This area was too far from Alterra’s sphere of influence. They did not receive a single copy of—or had even heard about—the cure, so people had to handle it the old way.

By the ’old way’, it was to isolate the afflicted ones and wait for nature to take its course. If they died, people with masks would get rid of them and bury them outside. If they survived, then they’d just live their lives, spending the rest of their short lives as an invalid.

More than a hundred orcs and half-orcs, and hundreds of human slaves, died that day.

Their orc population wasn’t that high to begin with. These hundreds of people were a large fraction of their existing population.

The memory was still fresh, and anything related to an illness automatically terrified people.

Althea took advantage of the chaos then, spreading more word about how to handle the ill. Amusingly, the other two teammates were also there and played along with her.

”Throw them out! Throw them out!”

”But don’t make them bleed!”

”Gently! They’re fragile! You want to get sick, too??”

The two half-orcs pretended not to know each other and were standing on opposite sides of the crowd, so no one thought they were together.

As for how they found out she had something to do with this chaos and played along accordingly, it was because, before they mixed with the array arrivals, Althea had given them vine bracelets.

They were just simple, unassuming vines wrapped around their arms. However, if Althea wanted to, and if she were close enough, she could manipulate it.

In this case, she manipulated the two vines to write something on the half-orcs’ palms with their leaves.

[I caused this] was all she said. Rather, in that situation, three words were all she could say.

The two half-orcs’ eyes met.

At the time, they only had one thought: Lady Althea was too awesome!